


Daddy Issues

by quinnkng



Category: UnREAL (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:08:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27706022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quinnkng/pseuds/quinnkng
Summary: In which Quinn's at a loss for words.
Relationships: Rachel Goldberg & Quinn King, Rachel Goldberg/Quinn King
Kudos: 11





	Daddy Issues

Quinn sits at her desk and taps her pen against her lips. When she was young, like, really young, she would chew her pen caps into shreds. She’d destroy an entire pack of Bics in a week, and her pencil case was an eraserless graveyard. She dropped the habit when Mike Kelly made fun of her for it in the sixth grade, in front of her entire math class no less. After that, the quirk lived only under extreme duress, behind closed doors.

Tonight is one of those nights. And that’s not to say she’s under extreme duress, per se, but she’s stressed, and more so grievously annoyed. The words just aren’t flowing, and that’s a problem she doesn’t encounter very often. She can balance a spreadsheet in an hour and she can write shitty scripts that focus groups eat up with her eyes closed. This is new, though. Her father is dead, the funeral is tomorrow, and quite frankly she’s got nothing to say about it.

She stands and crosses the room to her whiskey and pours steadily into crystal when the door opens. Rachel lets herself in, wordlessly settling on the couch, sloughing her bag off the arm.

“Can I help you?” Quinn asks, and Rachel shrugs.

“Heading out soon, wanted to say goodnight,” she says. Quinn nods, taking a long sip of her drink. Rachel in turn eyes the notepad sitting blank and open on the desk, a stark difference from her usual typed tasks. “What’s keeping you?”

Quinn considers her reply. They really don’t talk about personal things; they only talk about work. But it’s not like she’s heartbroken over this, really it’s as much work as is the budget meeting she has in the morning. So she tells Rachel:

“My dad died. The funeral’s tomorrow and I have to…write something for it.” She watches Rachel closely, for an uncomfortable shift, for her to pick at her fingernails like she does. Thankfully, she doesn’t squirm at the mention, just frowns.

“Quinn I’m sorry-”

“Don’t be. Not exactly father of the year,” Quinn cuts her off, flippant with a wave of her hand, walking back to her desk. She picks up her blank notepad, turning it to Rachel. “I’ve just got nothing for the bastard.”

“Do you want help?” Rachel asks. Quinn gives her a funny look.

“I don’t know how-”

“I mean, I wrote my high school’s graduation speech, so.”

At this Quinn snorts, her first laugh all day. “I don’t know that it’s really the same thing.”

“Just let me ghostwrite. I don’t have anywhere to be,” Rachel shrugs, and while Quinn hesitates a moment, she knows this to be true. She hands her the notebook and pen and sits beside her.

“Fine. What do you need?”

And so Rachel asks Quinn about her childhood, her family, the last time she spoke to her father, all of these things she would never have otherwise talked about––with anyone, let alone with Rachel of all people. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Rachel doesn’t pry, and she doesn’t really ask follow-up questions, because she, too, knows how weird this is. She speaks in tip-toed asks, just enough to get the vibe, jotting down messy notes. Quinn is aware of Rachel’s calculating questions, she knows exactly the amount of consciousness that’s going into the interaction. And it’s necessary, because this isn’t something they’d do naturally. This kind of conversation must be measured carefully and parsed out just so. This conversation is a tool, just a means to an end, a means to a eulogy.

At some point, Rachel stops taking notes and just listens, watching Quinn’s eyes blaze and wax and wane with each story––because the longer they talk, the more the anecdotes seem to defrost from their Q&A formalities and actually melt into stories. Real and vulnerable and messy. What started with her father’s job–– _ Technically? He was an electrician–– _ turned into how he could drive her mother to tears in 10 seconds flat, a daily ritual until she finally packed her bags one day and never came back. Quinn doesn’t look at Rachel when she recounts this. Somehow, though, they move on, and somehow Quinn starts to think that maybe telling Rachel all of this might not be the end of the world.

“So, I missed the bus, and I had to sit in the admin office with this bitchy receptionist, until like 7 PM, because no one could reach him,” Quinn says, getting up for another drink. “Do you-?”

Rachel nods with a smile and Quinn pours a second glass.

“But couldn’t you have gotten a ride home with a friend’s parents?” Rachel asks, and Quinn laughs and hands her the drink.

“Bold of you to assume I had friends, Rach.”

“I see,” Rachel muses, then takes a chance. “If we knew each other back then, do you think we would have been friends?”

Quinn leans her head back on the couch, closing her eyes. She’s still exhausted, but her stress is slowly dissipating as if absorbed by the red upholstery or the woman beside her. She doesn’t really care which, so long as her headache keeps fading.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I was pretty weird,” she says.

“You and me both,” Rachel replies, and Quinn allows a smile, her eyes still closed. She takes a deep breath, stretching out with one arm before sitting back up and turning to look squarely at Rachel.

“Cheers,” Quinn says, “to being alone.” She holds her glass up and Rachel gives a half-smile and nods, clinking their glasses. Quinn gives a pointed look to the notebook sitting between them. 

“How are we doing? Got some decent material?”

Rachel looks it over and flips the page, clicking the end of the pen. She thinks for a moment, looking at Quinn, who sits uncomfortably under her pensive gaze.

“What?” Quinn snaps, and Rachel turns back to the notebook, scribbling something out. Quinn sips her drink and watches her work, practically able to see the gears turning in her head. She notices how Rachel bites her lip, hesitating when she’s got a certain word on the tip of her tongue, and how she holds her pen weird, like a leftie, even though she’s right-handed. It’s a few minutes of this observation, silent but for the scrawl of the pen and the clock on Quinn’s desk until she finishes.

“Here.” Rachel hands her the paper. Quinn reads it over and it’s…good. It’s tasteful, it’s not aggrandizing, and it’s true. It’s a speech somehow both without lies and without bashing the man. Quinn had previously thought the two were mutually exclusive.

“This is better than he deserves,” she mutters, and Rachel frowns, ready to rework it. “I mean, no, it’s good. It’s perfect.” She stands and rips it from the notebook, filing it away on her desk. She then tears out the previous pages of Rachel’s notes.

“Hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into my deeply tragic formative years,” she says, waggling the pages in the air, “because this show isn’t coming to town again.” She pulls a paper shredder out of her desk and feeds the pages into it. Rachel watches, amused.

“Thank you,” Quinn says, after the shredder has finished, so quick and quiet Rachel almost thinks she imagined it. Rachel just nods and downs the last of her drink, standing and picking up her bag.

“Now are you ready to get out of here?”

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact, I turned this in for a grade in a creative writing class last semester.
> 
> Also, I recently tried to make an alt ~stan Twitter~ to have a place to yell about women away from the main, but it’s not going well. follow me there if you want, bc I only care about unreal and I don’t think anyone else does 😭 @kingsgoid !


End file.
